James Boyle on the Public Domain
“My goal here has been to offer a theory, and a practice, of the public domain. The theory and practice come with a change in attitude. It’s time to think about expanding the public domain, not just defending or salvaging it. Some of the decisions that have already been made were unfortunate. There was no need to extend the copyright terms, in my view. It was not economically justified, it didn’t harmonize the law, and we’ve locked up 20 years of culture for no good reason. But the good news is, I don’t think that the term extension would pass today. What we have to do now is to think of all of the ways in which we can use the wonderful technology that is available to us, and build a public domain that people can get access to practically, but also a public domain they are aware of. Because if people have a sense of this world of available, accessible information, and understand what they can do with it, not just as passive consumers, but as people who can actually use and build on it, then we will solve the theoretical problem I started out with. We will have our rich and complex idea of public domain because we will all be living it every day.”